Soon It Starts
It is my brother, ready to go to war.
I realise I may not see him again.
He shakes my hand, which he’s never done before
and climbs into the truck with the other men.
I am a child but it’s up to me
to defend our mother and our home.
I stare at the hilltop. Nothing to see.
No smoke and no sound of guns. All alone,
now that the Smiths have gone and their dog.
It is as quiet as untouched snow.
I’ve expected blind Pew or some such rogue
to come round the corner. Instead, the slow
setting of the sun catches my eye
bringing with it a still red sky.
~~~~~
Judith
There is a job to be done so they go
about their business. They press the falchion
into the neck, pull across the throat, slow
but sure, resolute in a shared motion,
concentrating, watching for the spraying
of the blood, severing, severing, sure,
busy in the employment of betraying
drunken trust, busy in the act of raw,
humane slaughter. Not long now, going well.
This is necessary. It changes things:
it allows a rightful passage to hell
and saves a whole nation. The singer sings
that killing is wrong — then nothing’s to do.
They say that true sense is the way to go.
Informed by Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes
Alan Dunnett has a collection from Graft Poetry out next year. A chapbook, Snuff One’s Glim, was published by Livor Mortis Zine, March 2024. Poems have also appeared in Poetry and Settled Status For All (2022 anthology), Acumen, London Grip New Poetry, Dark Poets Club, Ink Sweat & Tears, Stand, The Rialto, The New European. Film-poem Assassin awarded a 2020 Best Rhythm & Poetry for Berlin Deadline at Berlin Underground Film Festival. He wrote/voiced the film-poem Interrogation, Best Experimental Film at the Verona International Film Festival 2019. A collection, A Third Colour, was published by Culture Matters in 2018.
